LG G4 Is Official, Has Removable Back Cover, Expandable Storage, Android 5.1 And More

LG was never secretive about the G4 so there was little wonder when the company finally made the device official a few hours ago. It is what we expected and the device is textbook LG. The design language is what we have come to expect in recent years and it has notable upgrades where it matters like the display while still maintaining the 2560 x 1440 pixels, the processor (debatable) and the camera.

The G4 gets an 8 megapixel front-facing camera with better gesture control so that you don’t have to spend a lot of time taking that selfie. The 16 megapixel main camera is where the magic is supposedly at as it has a f/1.8 aperture (as expected) and second generation optical image stabilization (OIS) for better shots when you’re in dimly lit environments.

The most interesting bit is that while the G4, like the Samsung Galaxy S6 and the HTC One M9, won’t have Ingress Protection (water and dust proofing), it has what the rest have been walking away from (we’re staring at you Samsung S6): expandable storage and a removable battery. This is good for providing choice to those who felt abandoned when Samsung decided to leave out memory expansion and removable batteries as it switched to an all-metal design. The G4 is still plastic so it can afford these.

Whereas the G4 one-ups its rivals as far as storage expansion and swappable batteries go, it doesn’t support wireless charging right out of the box. You’ll need those special covers to get it working. There’s also no quick-charging support of any sort. That in this day and age when quick-charge is the in-thing. Probably the 3000 mAh battery will last long enough (and why shouldn’t it?) till you get home and charge it overnight and won’t run out while you’re stuck somewhere to need some quick juicing up.

LG is also throwing a couple of useful features on the device. The custom software on the G4, is, according to LG, stripped down. LG says it will only pre-load the very essential applications and will drop everything else. So much that it is claiming that it won’t be pre-loading its own browser in favour of Google’s Chrome. Samsung also promised us the same and it somehow managed to get some things right and others wrong though generally it did well. We’ll wait for a hands-on with the device to know whether LG keeps its word or it’s mere rhetoric. Buyers of the G4 will get 100 GB free Google Drive storage.

It is worth noting that LG is going with Qualcomm’s hexacore Snapdragon 808 instead of the 810 it used on the G Flex 2. LG believes the 808 is able to compete at the same level as Samsung’s famed Exynos 7420 on the S6.